Who or what is really to blame?
4. Improve the quality of the projections
Better forecasts reduce the chance of guessing wrong, and a creative problem-solving effort aimed at making better forecasts can help narrow the range between your high and low guesses. Take some time to look for more and better examples to compare your situation to. Collect alter- native forecasting tools and try them out. (Have you conducted a survey or a focus group, for example, or looked at trends in competitors’ sales?) The creative problem-solver takes an innovative approach to business choices and isn’t limited by the initial set of options in his payoff table. Treat this table as a starting point for your analysis, planning, and imagining, and you’ll make better decisions than most people do!
Engaging Your Creative Dissatisfaction
Executive decision-making often takes the form of making informed choices.
Forecasts and payoff tables help make your choice more informed, but they don’t improve your options — just help you choose among them. The innova- tive executive doesn’t just want to choose among options; she also wants to improve them. Executive decision-making ought to involve innovation, not just selection. If you don’t see a great option, stop and think. Maybe you can improve the options before making your choice.
Recognizing the opportunity to be creative
How do you improve your options before deciding? Simple: Be dissatisfied.
As I say repeatedly in this book, the first and most important step in innovation is deciding that you want and need to be creative. The next time the world dishes up a choice of options, reject the “Which one?” framing, and restate the problem as “Why be limited to these options?”
I use the term creative dissatisfaction to describe the way that innovative decision-makers work. It’s amazing how often you can — and will — find a better choice after you engage your creative dissatisfaction. Be assertive about demanding more time, thought, and information. Incubate the problem overnight. Ask others what they think. In short, engage all the creative-thinking tools you know about (see Chapters 6, 7, and 8), and turn the process of decision-making into an opportunity for creative thinking, not just for choosing among existing options.
Figure 9-2 shows what happened when a company that made industrial cutting equipment was examining options for three new product designs.
After testing prototypes and showing them to core customers, the sales force projected low, medium, and high sales for the three designs.
Figure 9-2:
Improving the payoff by adding options.
Unit sales In thousands
Options before brainstorming New option with higher forecast sales
Start Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
Although the design with the highest sales projections was somewhat more costly to make than the other two, the executive team was eager to capture the most possible sales and was about to choose that option. Then one of the executives asked for some extra time to examine the three prototypes and think about the question. A week later, he presented a fourth design that combined good ideas from the other three but was made from off-the-shelf parts, which allowed for much lower production costs and pricing. The sales force was very excited and projected unit sales for this newest design at more than twice the level of the other three. Without a creative rethinking of the options, the company would have invested in a mediocre product that didn’t sell nearly as well as the one it finally selected.
Considering the opportunity costs of not innovating
Neat payoff spreadsheets, graphs, and tables make your choices look fixed and discourage you from doing more creative thinking. Watch out for this effect! No matter how neatly a decision is presented in a payoff table or other businesslike format, it’s still possible to come up with even better choices.
The official term for failure to see and pursue a better option is opportunity cost. You don’t pay opportunity cost now; you pay it in the future, when some competitor comes out with a better design and your own sales fall, making you wish that you’d taken more time to improve your own design.
In Figure 9-2, the opportunity cost is represented by the distance between the highest solid line and the dashed one. Without innovation, the best-case scenario is significantly worse.
Applying intuition along with logic
How do the great inventors and entrepreneurs come up with their break- through ideas? Not by constructing payoff tables and lists of pros and cons.
Those and many other analytical activities — such as reading about the field and talking to experts — simply set the stage for a breakthrough. The real creative “aha!” moment comes from stewing about the problem for a long time until a fresh approach wells up from deep in your imagination.
Give yourself permission to imagine, dream, and create. Go for a long walk.
Visit a museum. Play a musical instrument. Dance. Get out of your normal business context and see if a really great idea occurs to you. People who have great ideas are people who believe in great ideas and give themselves a chance to think deeply about the problems facing them. Give yourself permis- sion to be a breakthrough thinker, and you’ll find that the number and origi- nality of your ideas increase dramatically.